Goal Exploration via Adaptive Skill Distribution for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Exploration efficiency poses a significant challenge in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) tasks, particularly those with long horizons and sparse rewards. A primary limitation to exploration efficiency is the agent's inability to leverage environmental structural patterns. In this study, we introduce a novel framework, GEASD, designed to capture these patterns through an adaptive skill distribution during the learning process. This distribution optimizes the local entropy of achieved goals within a contextual horizon, enhancing goal-spreading behaviors and facilitating deep exploration in states containing familiar structural patterns. Our experiments reveal marked improvements in exploration efficiency using the adaptive skill distribution compared to a uniform skill distribution. Additionally, the learned skill distribution demonstrates robust generalization capabilities, achieving substantial exploration progress in unseen tasks containing similar local structures.

Music Enhancement with Deep Filters: A Technical Report for The ICASSP 2024 Cadenza Challenge

In this challenge, we disentangle the deep filters from the original DeepfilterNet and incorporate them into our Spec-UNet-based network to further improve a hybrid Demucs (hdemucs) based remixing pipeline. The motivation behind the use of the deep filter component lies at its potential in better handling temporal fine structures. We demonstrate an incremental improvement in both the Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR) and the Hearing Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI) metrics when comparing the performance of hdemucs against different versions of our model.

Breaking the Limitations with Sparse Inputs by Variational Frameworks (BLIss) in Terahertz Super-Resolution 3D Reconstruction

Data acquisition, image processing, and image quality are the long-lasting issues for terahertz (THz) 3D reconstructed imaging. Existing methods are primarily designed for 2D scenarios, given the challenges associated with obtaining super-resolution (SR) data and the absence of an efficient SR 3D reconstruction framework in conventional computed tomography (CT). Here, we demonstrate BLIss, a new approach for THz SR 3D reconstruction with sparse 2D data input. BLIss seamlessly integrates conventional CT techniques and variational framework with the core of the adapted Euler-Elastica-based model. The quantitative 3D image evaluation metrics, including the standard deviation of Gaussian, mean curvatures, and the multi-scale structural similarity index measure (MS-SSIM), validate the superior smoothness and fidelity achieved with our variational framework approach compared with conventional THz CT modal. Beyond its contributions to advancing THz SR 3D reconstruction, BLIss demonstrates potential applicability in other imaging modalities, such as X-ray and MRI. This suggests extensive impacts on the broader field of imaging applications.

FL-GUARD: A Holistic Framework for Run-Time Detection and Recovery of Negative Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for learning a model from data distributed on massive clients without exposing data privacy. It works effectively in the ideal federation where clients share homogeneous data distribution and learning behavior. However, FL may fail to function appropriately when the federation is not ideal, amid an unhealthy state called Negative Federated Learning (NFL), in which most clients gain no benefit from participating in FL. Many studies have tried to address NFL. However, their solutions either (1) predetermine to prevent NFL in the entire learning life-cycle or (2) tackle NFL in the aftermath of numerous learning rounds. Thus, they either (1) indiscriminately incur extra costs even if FL can perform well without such costs or (2) waste numerous learning rounds. Additionally, none of the previous work takes into account the clients who may be unwilling/unable to follow the proposed NFL solutions when using those solutions to upgrade an FL system in use. This paper introduces FL-GUARD, a holistic framework that can be employed on any FL system for tackling NFL in a run-time paradigm. That is, to dynamically detect NFL at the early stage (tens of rounds) of learning and then to activate recovery measures when necessary. Specifically, we devise a cost-effective NFL detection mechanism, which relies on an estimation of performance gain on clients. Only when NFL is detected, we activate the NFL recovery process, in which each client learns in parallel an adapted model when training the global model. Extensive experiment results confirm the effectiveness of FL-GUARD in detecting NFL and recovering from NFL to a healthy learning state. We also show that FL-GUARD is compatible with previous NFL solutions and robust against clients unwilling/unable to take any recovery measures.

MedTransformer: Accurate AD Diagnosis for 3D MRI Images through 2D Vision Transformers

Automated diagnosis of AD in brain images is becoming a clinically important technique to support precision and efficient diagnosis and treatment planning. A few efforts have been made to automatically diagnose AD in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using three-dimensional CNNs. However, due to the complexity of 3D models, the performance is still unsatisfactory, both in terms of accuracy and efficiency. To overcome the complexities of 3D images and 3D models, in this study, we aim to attack this problem with 2D vision Transformers. We propose a 2D transformer-based medical image model with various transformer attention encoders to diagnose AD in 3D MRI images, by cutting the 3D images into multiple 2D slices.The model consists of four main components: shared encoders across three dimensions, dimension-specific encoders, attention across images from the same dimension, and attention across three dimensions. It is used to obtain attention relationships among multiple sequences from different dimensions (axial, coronal, and sagittal) and multiple slices. We also propose morphology augmentation, an erosion and dilation based method to increase the structural difference between AD and normal images. In this experiment, we use multiple datasets from ADNI, AIBL, MIRAID, OASIS to show the performance of our model. Our proposed MedTransformer demonstrates a strong ability in diagnosing AD. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of MedTransformer in learning from 3D data using a much smaller model and its capability to generalize among different medical tasks, which provides a possibility to help doctors diagnose AD in a simpler way.

CARAT: Contrastive Feature Reconstruction and Aggregation for Multi-modal Multi-label Emotion Recognition

Multi-modal multi-label emotion recognition (MMER) aims to identify relevant emotions from multiple modalities. The challenge of MMER is how to effectively capture discriminative features for multiple labels from heterogeneous data. Recent studies are mainly devoted to exploring various fusion strategies to integrate multi-modal information into a unified representation for all labels. However, such a learning scheme not only overlooks the specificity of each modality but also fails to capture individual discriminative features for different labels. Moreover, dependencies of labels and modalities cannot be effectively modeled. To address these issues, this paper presents ContrAstive feature Reconstruction and AggregaTion (CARAT) for the MMER task. Specifically, we devise a reconstruction-based fusion mechanism to better model fine-grained modality-to-label dependencies by contrastively learning modal-separated and label-specific features. To further exploit the modality complementarity, we introduce a shuffle-based aggregation strategy to enrich co-occurrence collaboration among labels. Experiments on two benchmark datasets CMU-MOSEI and M3ED demonstrate the effectiveness of CARAT over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/chengzju/CARAT.

Bias Resilient Multi-Step Off-Policy Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

In goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), sparse rewards present significant challenges, often obstructing efficient learning. Although multi-step GCRL can boost this efficiency, it can also lead to off-policy biases in target values. This paper dives deep into these biases, categorizing them into two distinct categories: "shooting" and "shifting". Recognizing that certain behavior policies can hasten policy refinement, we present solutions designed to capitalize on the positive aspects of these biases while minimizing their drawbacks, enabling the use of larger step sizes to speed up GCRL. An empirical study demonstrates that our approach ensures a resilient and robust improvement, even in ten-step learning scenarios, leading to superior learning efficiency and performance that generally surpass the baseline and several state-of-the-art multi-step GCRL benchmarks.

The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluation

We introduce the Song Describer dataset (SDD), a new crowdsourced corpus of high-quality audio-caption pairs, designed for the evaluation of music-and-language models. The dataset consists of 1.1k human-written natural language descriptions of 706 music recordings, all publicly accessible and released under Creative Common licenses. To showcase the use of our dataset, we benchmark popular models on three key music-and-language tasks (music captioning, text-to-music generation and music-language retrieval). Our experiments highlight the importance of cross-dataset evaluation and offer insights into how researchers can use SDD to gain a broader understanding of model performance.